


i loved you long ago (i've never stopped)

by notcaycepollard



Series: out of time [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Phil has a lot of feelings, Time Travel, tiny baby deer Phil Coulson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 14:57:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5168096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcaycepollard/pseuds/notcaycepollard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For all he knows, the time jump created a divergent reality. Their paths might never cross, in this universe. He tries to stop remembering. He's spent a lifetime looking for Skye. Perhaps she doesn't exist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i loved you long ago (i've never stopped)

**Author's Note:**

> a companion piece to "just know where to find me (i'll have loved you all along)". Because: tiny feelings phil coulson and his sweeping yearning feelings.

When Darcy appears, and so clearly knows him, Coulson doesn't know what to think.  _How do you know me. What's going on_. Time travel, she tells him, and he half expects her to follow it up with,  _come with me if you want to live_.

Her clothing's tighter than he's used to, cut differently, and the slim little piece of tech in her hand is so far from what he recognizes as a cellular telephone, that it doesn't seem so outlandish. Protocol 618. Don't ask too many questions, don't find out future events, don't disrupt the flow of history. Sure, that's easy. He can follow directives. 

He takes her home, because it seems easiest, and the way she teases him in the car about being a rookie agent, the expression he catches in her eyes when he tells her he's twenty-five, he puts the pieces together. _I'm older when you know me. More experienced. Maybe older than you._ She's cautious, gives him an obviously fake name, but he likes the way it sounds nevertheless.  _Darcy_. She'd caught herself to start with, the first consonant slipping out before she'd pulled herself back, so her real name begins with D too, maybe. He likes the way she says his name, too,  _Phil_ , familiar and arch and playfully teasing, and he wonders how long she's known him, to say his name so easily.

She slips, in the kitchen, and her smirk takes his breath away.  _How often?_ he wonders. How often does he cook for her, that this will be a part of their history together? Do they live together? Does she come home to grilled cheese and soup and Phil's dumb catchphrase uttered as comforting and easy as pie? He asks, without thinking, and Darcy's face closes over, goes blank in a way that's disconcerting.

"Phil, you know you can't try and work it out," she says sternly, and he does, he knows, but he still wants to know.

He offers her another grilled cheese, instead, lets his eyes linger on the defined muscle of her shoulders. She's beautiful. He wonders if he knows that, in the future.

 

+

 

Phil can't help it, he keeps trying to figure Darcy out. He catches her looking at him, sometimes, and there's something in her gaze. Is it sad, or wistful? It feels  _longing_. She touches his arm, drags her fingers down his skin, and it's the first time she's touched him, and Phil thinks, oh god, Darcy, do you love me? In the future, do you love me?

"I love it when you roll your sleeves up like this," she tells him, pauses, leaves her fingers against the pulse of his left wrist, and her face is so  _sad_. She draws back, looks up at him, looks away, and Phil's never wanted to know more.

"Darcy-" he says, but he can't ask, in the end. Even if it's him, it's not him she loves.

She talks to him about work, though, cooks his mother's pot pie, doesn't deny that he'll teach her this someday, sidesteps his questions about what they are.  _Do you even know_ , he wonders, and finally she says it. "You'll miss me in the future," she says, but her face is still so wistful, and he can't help it. He's clearly an idiot in the future, and he thinks he could love her now, and when she pulls him in, whispers her name, kisses him, he thinks,  _Phil Coulson, you're going to be such a fool, but I'm not._ _  
_

Skye disappears days later, pulled back into her time, and all Phil can think is, they didn't have enough  _time_. 

 

+

 

He waits and waits. Every woman he sees with a fall of dark hair, a particular shape of cheekbone, an arch of the brow, gives him a breathless moment, but it's never Skye. She could be five, or fifteen, or twenty-two. She could be living overseas. He searches the SHIELD personnel database every couple of years. There's never an Agent Skye, or an Agent Darcy. Skye could have been a false name too, he thinks.

He tries to forget, dates other people, but it's easier just to commit to SHIELD, to move up Level by Level until nobody could ever call him a rookie agent, even as a joke. One day he catches himself closing his expression over, schooling his face into purposeful, easy blankness, and laughs, because it's Skye's expression, placid and careful and revealing nothing at all, and did she learn it from him, some time still long from now? Did he teach her that?

He hits forty, and it's twenty years since he saw the way she looked at him, but when he buys a new suit, he still remembers the way Skye would watch him pull off his jacket, undo his tie, roll up his sleeves.  _Am I dressing like you were used to seeing me? Is this the Coulson you remembered every time you looked at me?_ He's stopped searching the personnel files. For all he knows, the time jump created a divergent reality. Their paths might never cross, in this universe. He tries to stop remembering.

Coulson goes to New Mexico, and Darcy Lewis is a shock, even though she's so obviously not Skye.  _Do you, will you, know Darcy? Is that why you chose the cover name?_ Darcy Lewis could be a great agent, actually, but he doesn't offer her a place in SHIELD. She's not Agent Darcy. (There is no Agent Darcy.)

Then New York happens, and Coulson's dying, and he thinks, final and sad, that it must have been a different timeline after all. He's spent a lifetime looking for Skye. Perhaps she doesn't exist.

 

+

 

He's alive, and he's tracking down superheroes, and there's a hacker group dedicated to the task of exposing superheroes and SHIELD information and everything they're trying to hide. It's as good a place to start as any, Coulson thinks, pulls up the first Rising Tide podcast, puts on his headphones and presses play.

"No matter what you do, we will find you, and we will share your secrets with the world," Skye says, and Coulson can't breathe with the shock. He rewinds it, plays it again.  _We will find you_ , Skye says, again and again, and oh god, it's her voice, the cadence and tenor just how he remembers it, and when they have to bring her in, question her about Mike Peterson, he knows exactly where she'll be.

There's a van parked in the alleyway, and he slides open the door, and there she is. She's so  _young_ , Coulson hardly recognizes her. Her hair's longer, and her face is so open, but oh, when she tells them her name. "Skye," she scowls, glares at him, and it's all he can do not to say it.  _I loved you a lifetime ago. Perhaps someday you'll love me too._

She teasingly calls him  _Phil_ , and it's too much, too much like how she said it before. "What's wrong with Coulson?" he asks, and the smirk she gives him, that's pure Skye all along.

She drags him out of the TAHITI machine, and he lets himself gasp her name,  _Skye, Skye_ , and he's beginning to learn the history Skye so obviously saw whenever she looked at him as a young man. This is what was between them; for the first time, he's glad they didn't build a life then, because this, now, this is precious.

 

+

 

When Skye is shot, Coulson remembers how she'd brushed it off. "Before I joined SHIELD," she'd said, but he didn't know this is what she meant. How could he know. He doesn't know how she's going to get through this, how she'll survive, and then it's obvious, and oh, this is another thing they're linked by, another part of their history.

She'd been more careful than he ever knew, hadn't breathed a word of this future, and everything that happens, he wonders  _how_. If he'd known it, could he have held it back, shown it in nothing more than occasional wistful glances? SHIELD falls, and he recalls the tiny pause Skye had made when he'd mentioned Sitwell. She'd known, she'd met Fury as his SO, she'd not said a thing, and god, how had she been so brave.

Her powers are a surprise, something he'd never even dreamed of, and even as she's struggling to control them, he thinks,  _you'll learn, you did learn, because I never knew_. He'd never noticed a single tremor. Oh, he realizes, this is it, this is the first time he ever makes her a grilled cheese. What was it he'd said?

"It's a secret ingredient," he tells her, trying to make her smile. "Don't ask, I will not disclose." Skye does smile, and it's beautiful, just as beautiful as the smirk she'd given him twenty-four years ago and sometime in the future, and he aches with it, with remembering, with learning her all over again.

It's easier every day not to say anything. Coulson's learned compartmentalization, and an easily expressionless face, and how to put aside what he wants. He remembers how he'd thought himself a fool. Perhaps he is. But Skye's so young, so  _young_ , and he can't imagine, now, what she'd see in him.

Their history keeps building, and Coulson learns more and more, fits pieces into the puzzle of how Skye had looked, the spaces in what she'd said and done. When he grabs the crystal, when Mack cuts off his hand, he remembers, suddenly, the way Skye had looked at his arms, the way she'd touched her fingers to his pulse, and it makes sense in a way he'd never known to understand before.

 

+

 

"Daisy," she tells him, "I'm changing my name, okay," and he knows she's frustrated when he slips, knows she thinks it's because he remembers her as Skye, but it's not that. (It is that. She's cut her hair short, and she's never looked more like  _Skye_ , the Skye he fell for half a decade ago, and when he slips, it's not because he's remembering Skye, it's because he's remembering  _Skye_.)

(Sometimes, he slips twice, starts to say "Darcy", catches it to "Daisy", and the consonant on his tongue, it's like she's introducing herself for the first time.)

Every day she looks more like Skye, and she starts to call him  _Phil_ , and he hears the familiarity in it, the teasing playfulness. This is how long, then, this is how long she's known him, this is the point she's started to say his name easy as breathing. Will it be today? he wonders. Or tomorrow? He can't keep waiting for it. It could still be a divergent reality, one where they meet  _here_  but never  _then_. His memories could be lying.

 

+

 

Hunter and Fitz and Mack return from a mission without Daisy, and they're carrying a machine Coulson recognizes from photos he saw years and years ago.  _This is it, this is the day, this is where you came from_ , he thinks, can't concentrate on the end of his meeting with Rosalind.

"Where's Agent Johnson?" she asks, sharp, and Coulson thinks,  _she's in the past, she's with me, she's meeting me for the first time. She's beautiful_. He knows that, in the future. He's known that all along.

They have the machine, here, and Fitz and Mack and Simmons figure it out in a way that he and Daisy couldn't from the other end. It's simple, with 2015 tech at their disposal, and he thinks of how difficult it had been, how frustrated Skye must have been with the lack of resources. Fitz and Simmons engineer the machine to calibrate into Skye's DNA, to pick her up and nobody else, and all that's left is to find a place and a time they know she'll be.

Coulson knows this. He's always known this.  _Find me_ , she'd told him, and he's found her there once. He'll find her there again.

"I want you," Daisy says, "I've always wanted you," and he realizes, finally, what Skye was looking for when she looked at him so wistfully. She was looking for  _him_ , and it changes everything. He'd wondered, once. _Do you love me? In the future, do you love me?_ He could have loved her then, did love her then, loves her now, and she's loved him all along, then and now and in the spaces in between.


End file.
